The paper investigates the impacts of export-platform foreign direct investment (FDI) on backward linkages. First, in a three-country model, these impacts are explained through the competition effect and the demand effect. Whenever the former is stronger than the latter, the investment has a...

European Union (EU) trade policy has become increasingly contested and politicised. Citizens and politicians have become more and more concerned about the human rights and sustainable development implications of free trade. The European Commission in its 'Trade for All' Strategy has recognized...

In recent years, a number of studies have been put forth to assess the potential economic effects of the EU-US trade agreement – the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Most studies report gains for the TTIP-member states. However, the commonly applied CGE models contain...

The liberalization and protection of investment flows has become an increasingly indispensable pillar of economic integration. The objective of this study is to contribute to a better understanding of the ways in which RTAs achieve such liberalization and protection. To this end, we have...

The "TTIP Leaks" documents published by Greenpeace in Mai 2016 offered some new insides into the progress of TTIP negotiations and gave a new drive to public discussions on the issue. Although the value added in transparency produced by the Greenpeace papers is limited, it nevertheless seems to...

Why do governments sign services trade agreements? This paper focuses on the role of international agreements in the context of trade in services when services are used as intermediate inputs in downstream industries. Compared to goods, services inputs are mostly non-tradable and complementary...

This paper considers trade agreements in a sufficiently general framework to encompass both imperfectly competitive market structures and income effects in government objectives. We show that governments choose globally efficient policies if they act as if they do not value the impact of their...

The scope and depth of bilateral and regional preferential trade agreements (RTAs) negotiated over the past 15 years has expanded beyond traditional market access and preferential tariffs to include provisions on a wide range of issues, including trade facilitation. This study is a first attempt...